Is your CV lacking enough professional work experience? Are you looking for ways to boost your resume with more experience? Then consider volunteering with local businesses or non-profits in your backyard.
Offering volunteer and unpaid services might be that job hack you need. This is especially the case for people with limited work experience, for recent graduates or people with employment gaps. Or for people looking to change careers and industries.
For these categories of people, volunteering and offering unpaid services are an often-overlooked way to gain meaningful experience. Of course, not being paid for a job does not mean you did not gain invaluable skills from it. The KEY is not necessarily revealing in your CV and during interviews that the role was an unpaid/volunteer role upfront.
Tips: How to Make the Most of Volunteer Opportunities
- When you find such an opportunity to volunteer or provide free services, you should approach it just like you would a paid position.
- During the intake process, listen attentively to their needs and challenges.
- Highlight how your talents could help move the needle for them. In most cases, the minimum requirements are often very low.
- As always, if the local business or non-profit senses your commitment, they’ll likely be willing to take you on. And happily, so. They can always do with an extra hand.
- Once hired, you should start racking up tangible experience. It’s important to approach your volunteer or unpaid duties with the same diligence and professionalism as any paying job.
- This would require you to, for instance, take ownership of projects assigned to you and immerse yourself in them. In fact, you can go further and ask for additional stretch opportunities that allow you to flex skills you want to develop even further. Keep in mind that the goal is to gain valuable experience that you can use to boost your CV that will return its financial value in the near future.
- You should track all your accomplishments, results, and responsibilities. This would require you to maintain an updated resume and portfolio demonstrating your progression.
How To List Your Volunteer Experiences on Your CV
1. Put Them on Your Experience Section? Heck Yeah! If you’re light on paid experience, sprinkle in those volunteer roles under your experience section. Format them just like a regular job. Remember the key is to not give yourself up upfront, but only when you have to.
2. Connect them to Your Skills Read the job description and connect your volunteer duties to the skills they want. For instance, if you have experience managing volunteers at a charity shop, then highlight how it prepped you for that executive assistant role–scheduling, organizing, project management, etc. Here, you should emphasize skills that can be transferred from your volunteer experience to the real-world job you’re seeking.
3. The Rest Goes to the Bottom If your volunteering had nothing to do with the new role you are seeking, no problem. In that case, make a mini volunteer section at the bottom of the CV. But only include things that might grab their attention, set you apart from other candidates or give additional context about yourself.
The Bottom Line
In the job world, any hands-on experience is invaluable. It allows you to assemble robust work samples to discuss during future interviews. It gives you specific examples and data with which you can validate your abilities rather than hypotheticals.
Who knows? You might even gain references and connections to the industry you’re targeting to transition to. Your lack of traditional experience for your career ambitions should not deter you. Get scrappy and creative by seeking out nearby places where you can volunteer while you wait for the big breaks.
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